Nadir Shah's Invasion and Sack of Delhi
Nadir Shah took Delhi in March 1739 and left with treasure it took a reported 700 elephants and 4,000 camels to carry. He was a Turkmen chieftain who had expelled the Afghans from Iran, put the last Safavid on the throne and then taken it himself, and had been campaigning continuously for a decade. The pretext was the Mughal court's failure to close its frontier to Afghan fugitives, and the reason was money: Iran had been at war for twenty years and Nadir needed to pay an army. He destroyed a Mughal force many times his size at Karnal in February in about three hours, chiefly because the Persian cavalry carried mounted firearms and the Mughal army fought as it had a century earlier. Muhammad Shah surrendered and the two entered Delhi together. What produced the massacre was a rumour that Nadir was dead, which set off attacks on Persian soldiers in the bazaars and killed several hundred. He rode out the next morning, sat in a mosque in Chandni Chowk, and gave the order for a general killing that ran from sunrise until he was petitioned to stop in the early afternoon. Estimates run from 20,000 to 30,000 dead. He took the imperial treasury, the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor, and remitted taxation in Iran for three years on the strength of it. The Mughal empire never recovered, and everyone in India drew the appropriate conclusion. The Peacock Throne was broken up and its stones dispersed, and the Koh-i-Noor went from Nadir to an Afghan general, to Ranjit Singh, and to Queen Victoria in 1849. Nadir himself was murdered by his own officers in 1747 and Iran collapsed into fifty years of civil war.
- Year: 1739 CE
- Category: Military
